Will ‘Treats’ Make PetSmart a Pet Parent’s Forever Friend?

Apr 20, 2023

PetSmart launched its Treats Rewards program in August 2018, intending to build deeper connections with the pet parents that shopped at the chain. More than four and a half years later, it seeks to deepen those connections with the more than 60 million members who have joined the program since its inception.

The retailer earlier this month launched its first-ever Treat Members Month. Members in the free program have been receiving weekly deals, opportunities to earn bonus points on purchases and entry into PetSmart’s “Treats Super Giveaway” contest with a chance to win one million Treats points.

Bradley Breuer, vice president marketing – loyalty, personalization, and CRM at PetSmart, told RetailWire that the retailer is pleased with the response of its Treats members to the month-long promotion.

“I would say that in most cases, we’re achieving expectations or exceeding them. We have a few offers where we are learning great things and they’re a little bit softer. But in the overall portfolio, we’re really pleased with the engagement,” said Mr. Brewer.

PetSmart emphasized frontline involvement to make Treat Members Month work at the store level.

“We spent a lot of time and energy engaging our store associates because they are truly the biggest ambassadors for us telling the loyalty story and getting people engaged,” said Mr. Brewer.

“I’ve seen stores who’ve taken the training materials and made awesome chalkboards explaining the offers. This morning I saw a post of a store associate on our internal comms channel explaining to a customer how to activate an offer,” he added.

PetSmart, understanding that its employees are pet parents too, provided store-level workers with a special Treats offer to see first-hand how it worked and better explain offers to members who had questions.

mr. Breuer said Treats is integral to PetSmart’s marketing.

“We’ve spent a lot of time really integrating Treats as sort of the full offering. So you see Treats come through in our email marketing, our SMS marketing, our push marketing, our direct mail marketing and then our on-receipt marketing,” he said.

mr. Breuer said PetSmart also works Treats into paid media placements. He pointed to the program being part of PetSmart’s holiday season commercials offering double-point rewards for purchases from the chain’s Merry & Bright proprietary brand collection.